North Aurora police investigating attempted home repair scam

Published: Wednesday, Jan. 30, 2013 3:58 p.m. CDT

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NORTH AURORA – North Aurora police are investigating an attempted home repair scam that occurred on Jan. 19.

The incident happened at about 10:30 a.m. in the 100 block of South River Road at the home of a 78-year-old woman. According to North Aurora police, a man came to the woman’s door and offered to repair her driveway by fixing the cracks and resurfacing the driveway with a “new type of coating,” not blacktop. He said the work would cost $1,000 and would come with an eight-year guarantee. He provided some fliers with the company name of Father and Son Construction, police said.

The woman agreed to the repair but asked for some written paperwork. When she was going to write a check for the repairs, the man told the woman the work would cost $200 more “to cover taxes” if she paid by check, police said. The woman agreed to go to the bank to get the cash.

Two younger men came into the kitchen and said they needed hot water to begin the repairs and one of them started looking downstairs, but was told by the woman that there was no water downstairs, police said. Then the subjects and the woman left the house.

The woman went to the bank, leaving her adult son to watch the repairs, police said. They left right after the woman left, promising to come back on Monday to complete the repairs, but they never returned. No payment was ever made and nothing appeared to be missing from the woman’s home, police said.

The subjects were described as a white man, 40 to 50 years old, medium height wearing a cap and sunglasses; a white male in his late 20s, approximately 5 feet, 8 inches tall with a cap and a white man in his late 20s, very thin, wearing a hooded shirt with the hood up. He also had wires or some type of dental device sticking out of his mouth, police said.

The truck the men used was described as a black pickup truck. The victim’s son noticed that the truck had a couple of buckets and a small ladder in the pickup, which caused him to be suspicious since they didn’t have tools that one would expect to resurface a driveway. A license plate check by North Aurora police officers revealed that the truck was registered to a known suspect believed to commit home repair and ruse entry scams in the Chicago area, police said.

North Aurora police say they believe that the woman was targeted because of her age, which is common in these type of scams, and that the scam was unsuccessful because the woman and her son did not allow the men to slip away unescorted into her home and because the woman obtained the license plate of the suspects' truck.